Fog Days

An Interview with Errol Morris

by Jeffrey M. Anderson

Errol Morris is arguably the greatest living documentary filmmaker.
More so than any other, he continues to find subjects that fit his
personal agenda: life out of control. Morris is fascinated by the
rituals and methods we use to convince ourselves that we have life by
the belt. He loves nothing more than to poke holes in them and unravel
them. Moreover, he has adopted a visual style that suits his
explorations: slightly tilted, off-kilter camera angels that struggle to
capture its un-capturable subjects, as well as strangely beautiful
"filler" footage and tense, relentless music.

After a string of great films, Gates of Heaven (1978), The Thin
Blue Line (1988), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) and Mr. Death:
The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. (1999), he has taken on his
toughest subject yet, the former Secretary of Defense under President
Kennedy and subsequently President Johnson: Robert S. McNamara, the man
many blame for the bitter failure of the Vietnam War.

I recently spoke to Mr. Morris about his new film The Fog of War
via phone from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

EM: I was attracted to McNamara's story because in it was this
feeling that the world was out of control. His version of the missile
crisis -- you have the movie version [13 Days] in which JFK saves
the world -- could have ended with a nuclear exchange between the Soviet
Union and the U.S. Someone asked me if I believe there is a risk of this
happening again. There's not only a risk, there's the reality. All of
these questions about historical events have uncanny resonance for the
current time.

CC: During the 60s and 70s you were vocally opposed to the Vietnam
War. At the time did you view Robert S. McNamara as a purely evil
person?

For everybody, he was an evil type person. There are two issues:
there's the person and his policies. I think it's necessary to point
out, that my views of the Vietnam War haven't changed at all. It was
appalling to me then, and it's appalling to me now. As for McNamara, I
knew only what I heard from TV or newspapers. I now know him. And of
course there's this question of is he the same man today as he was in
the 60s? One of the interesting things about The Fog of War is
that it has only one character. There's this feeling of a doppelganger,
the 80s McNamara and the 40s McNamara. Is it the same man? It's a
question I keep asking myself. Questions of personality strike me as the
ultimate mystery.

CC: The most remarkable thing is that McNamara can talk about all
this stuff without ever explaining it.

Sometimes he seems to be oddly abstracted from the narrative, as if
he's watching history unfold. One of the interesting things in
retrospect is when he gets to Vietnam -- when he became Secretary of
Defense under Kennedy -- the 'I' changes to 'we.' I have asked him and
others have asked him: Why didn't you resign? If you didn't agree with
Johnson's policies, why didn╣t you resign? After you were fired, why
didn't you speak out then? It's interesting. First of all, how many
cabinet secretaries have resigned? Not all that many. How many have
spoken out? Even fewer. But Mac says -- and it╣s clearly how he feels --
'Johnson was elected and I was not. I serve at the pleasure of the
president. I can disagree with the president privately, but not
publicly.' I've never asked him directly, but I have a theory that he
still thinks he's Secretary of Defense.

CC: Did you expect to get an apology from McNamara?

Apologies fascinate me. I've thought a lot about it. If the world is
really deeply out of control, which I really believe it is, someone
apologizes. The ball is in your court. They're apologizing to you. You
have a choice. You can accept their apology, or not. I believe it's this
deep desire to be empowered somehow. I'm not sure I have any definitive
answer. It comes out of reading [McNamara's book] In Retrospect. There
were countless articles, shows, all talking about McNamara's mea culpa.
All saying, 'we don't accept his apology.' There were two things that
fascinated me. How did people see this as an apology, when there really
wasn't one? Given that there wasn't one, did they invent one and then
reject it?

CC: You've interviewed a lot of people and have been interviewed
many times yourself, but McNamara must have been the most experienced
and slippery interviewee you've ever faced.

Every interview takes on a different character. Part of it is the
cameraman and lighting the set. There is something both elusive and
straightforward about McNamara that still fascinates me. Sony set up
screenings in New York and they invited all the celebrity journalists.
And Morley Safer came out of the screening and said, 'he certainly made
quite a career of hand-wringing.' And Tom Brokaw said, 'I always thought
of him as na´ve.' And it was interesting to me. A lot of the journalists
had their own perspective.

CC: If people long to be in control of everything, it seems very
convenient to simply blame McNamara for the war, to pin it all on him.

EM: Is history like some kind of comic book, where we always have to
find a new Lex Luthor? Maybe it's something about our wiring that we can
only see things in terms of heroes and villains. I don't like conspiracy
theories. I have an argument against conspiracy theories. We're monkeys!
Just look at people! To imagine that they can conspire together about
anything for any length of time is ludicrous.

CC: Do you suppose the current popularity of documentaries has
anything to do with the currently popularity of Reality TV?

EM: They feed off of each other. There are so many different kinds of
documentaries as there are so many different kinds of Reality TV. My
wife used to watch 'Cops' all the time. She said that it's the only show
on TV where you can see authentic dÚcor.

CC: There have been a lot of movies lately -- Bowling for
Columbine, Winged Migration, Stone Reader -- that have started people
talking about how objective documentaries really are.

EM: The blurring between documentary and fiction, it has called
attention to how easily we can be deceived. The ironic use of reenacted
material makes us think about our relationship to the real world. It
doesn't deny our relationship with the truth. It makes us think about
the truth. I'm amused that people think that a style of presentation
means truth. Style isn't about truth. Truth is about truth.